Deeplinks Blog posts about Privacy

Yesterday, EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston testified before Congress, urging that the federal wiretapping law be updated to protect Americans against secret video surveillance just as it protects against covert electronic eavesdropping.

Today two computer security researchers, Christopher Soghoian and Sid Stamm, released a draft of a forthcoming research paper in which they present evidence that certificate authorities (CAs) may be cooperating with government agencies to help them spy undetected on "secure" encrypted communications. (EFF sometimes advises Soghoian on responsible disclosure issues, including for this paper.) More details and reporting are available at Wired today.

Interested in working with EFF or Tor, and getting paid for it by Google? If you are a student and a coder, then we have good news for you: A few of our projects have been accepted for Google's Summer Of Code 2010.

Last Friday, Senators Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) outlined a proposal for immigration reform. At the top of their immigration reform agenda? A national, biometric identification card for all workers, citizen or immigrant. From the article:

HTTPS is the backbone of web security. The protocol, which is also commonly known as the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), is what guarantees we can use the web to transmit sensitive information — financial, medical, or other — with relative confidence that it won't be intercepted or stolen. EFF has been arguing for years that best practices demand that all sensitive data be sent exclusively over SSL.

Unfortunately, most major providers of web-based email and other sensitive web-based services do not even give their users the option of using SSL, let alone turn it on by default. As a result, countless terabytes of sensitive data are transmitted over the Internet insecurely every day, greatly contributing to online fraud, data-theft and surveillance by authoritarian regimes.